Tuesday 21 January 2014 08.00 EST
First published on Tuesday 21 January 2014 08.00 EST

Housing has played second fiddle politically for a generation. After Margaret Thatcher's right-to-buy, politicians doggedly refused to interfere in an increasingly dysfunctional housing market. Hence the mess we're in today. Suddenly politicians are quick to diagnose the housing problem, but administering the right medicine is proving more difficult – in part because that fear of meddling persists.

In her first significant contribution as shadow housing minister, Labour's Emma Reynolds said it was time to build a new generation of council housing; a straightforward message for her party's audience. But she did not say how this would be achieved, hemmed in as she is by the lack of leadership on housing policy from Ed Miliband and Ed Balls.

"As currently structured, our country's building sector has a broken gearstick," Reynolds was left to say. "When the time comes to shift up a gear, our housebuilding industry is found wanting." Her solution is to marshal "an army of smaller firms and custom builders" to help people to build their own homes. She wants to give custom builders – small local developers that work with home buyers to help plan their home before it is built – a right to build a proportion of homes within new towns or garden cities.

Both women understand we need to find a way to build fast, but their cures for the problem are bad medicine. Neither small-scale custom build, nor efforts to get brownfield land back in use, are sufficient because of a simple lack of leadership. Well-meaning campaign groups and small companies – even local authorities – are unable to solve the housing crisis by themselves. Elphicke's analogy fails: every hospital has a chief executive but there's no central decision-maker for housebuilding. Putting enough new houses on the ground quickly takes national leadership.

The coalition has already made the mistake of scrapping regional planning in favour of neighbourhood plans for new homes directed by local people. It's like asking turkeys to vote for Christmas; even the planning minister, Nick Boles, has said the policy isn't working.

Now the government has to right its wrongs by creating garden cities, which by will require top-down design and management. That's not a bad thing. We need someone to have an overarching vision for our urban future if we're going to take steps towards solving the housing crisis. From Letchworth to Milton Keynes, new cities are created and managed by a development corporation whose sole job is to make new communities come to life. It's a model that works well and allows new ideas to be tested (Milton Keynes is the only British city where shared ownership is popular and widespread).

Instead of tinkering around the sidelines with custom build, Labour should try to trump the coalition using the garden city method. Yes, let's have the five new communities promised. But let's go the whole hog and create a national development corporation to manage an urgent housebuilding programme with all local authorities. It's not centralism, it's not meddling with markets: it's leadership.